Herald of Leshrac

The rent is the whole arrangement, and the rent escalates. Every upkeep you pay the cumulative cost not in mana but in stolen territory: a land you don't control, seized from whoever you choose. Because the price is a cumulative upkeep, you owe one land the first turn, two the next, three the turn after that. The pile does not grow by one each turn; it grows by the running total, which means the confiscation accelerates from a trickle to a flood within a few cycles. The body scales with the haul (bigger for every land you control but do not own, with no ceiling on how far the spiral runs), so a Herald left alive is both an evasive clock and a slow-motion seizure of the table's mana base. The catch lives inside the same clock that powers it: the tax compounds, and the day you cannot or will not pay it, the creature dies. That is when the second clause fires and every borrowed land snaps home to its owner. This is the design's honesty. It is not permanent theft in the manner of the old aura-based land stealers; it is a lease, structurally guaranteed to expire, and the steeper you lean on it the sooner the bill outruns you. What you buy is a window: a handful of turns commanding lands you should not command, flying over a board whose symmetry you have temporarily, and expensively, broken.